Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)

This talk is modeled after a similar presentation given at Wikimania 2009 in what we hope will become a Wikimania tradition.

This talk will offer a quick tour of scholarship and academic research over the last year that has focused on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. It will both give a birds-eye-view of Wikimedia research as a whole and go into depth on a dozen or so of the most important findings. The goal is to explain both what our community is teaching others and what Wikimedia editors, the Wikimedia Foundation, and our community as a whole, might be able to learn about ourselves. While wonderful research will be presented as part of the academic track, and while we hope that WikiSym will bring a larger proportion of Wikipedia and Wikimedia researchers to Wikimania this year, this talk will focus on the other important results that will not be presented at the conference.

In particular, Felipe Ortega will focus on the published results from WikiSym, held just days before the conference in Gdansk. Benjamin Mako Hill will look beyond the academic conference focused on Wikis to describe other important results from a variety of fields.

A quick search of a multi-disciplinary scholarly database over 300 scholarly publications (i.e., articles, books, thesis, etc.) in the last year alone that contain the term "Wikipedia" in their title. Journals and conferences in the social sciences, computational sciences, humanities, engineering, and a variety of other fields have published scholarly works that examine Wikipedia, use data mined from Wikipedia, and try to help us make sense of Wikimedia projects, their people, processes, and artifacts. A half dozen people have now graduated with PhDs earned by studying Wikipedia. There are even conferences --- WikiSym most notable among them --- that focus on wikis and who are heavily biased toward publishing work based on Wikipedia. Even Wikimania now has an academic track where scholars are presenting their own Wikimedia and Wikipedia research. What does all this work mean for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects? How can our community learn from academic research into our projects? Does any of this work have anything to teach us about how to run our projects? What does all that academic jargon mean in terms that any editor could understand?

This talk will try to point toward answers to these questions with a quick tour --- a literature review in the scholarly parlance --- of the last year's academic landscape around Wikimedia and its projects geared at non-academic editors and readers. It will try to categorize, distill, and describe, from a birds eye view, the academic landscape as it is shaping up around our project. It will build both the experience of the facilitators, existing resources in our community (e.g., meta:Wiki Research Bibliography and en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies), and on research done for this presentation. It will quickly highlight a dozen or so of the most important articles published in the last year on Wikipedia, summarize their results, and describe what these findings might mean for Wikipedia, its editors, and processes.

The talk will be given by two social scientists and academic studying Wikipedia and free culture and free software communities (e.g., he serves on the program committee for WikiSym) who are also Wikipedia editors. One presentor is also a and member of the Wikimedia advisory board. They will work to translate between his two communities. Collaboration on this presentation with others is welcome!

Wikimedia and its projects are and will remain, for some time, under academia's magnifying glass. This talk will give Wikimedians a view from the other side and help point at where we might go with some of the insight we gain in the process.

Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure)